A micromouse builders blog
The results of the 2009 UK micromouse competition are now available. Also posted here are the results of some of the allied competitions – the wall followers and the time trials. Read the rest of this entry »
The UK Micromouse championships were held at the Technology innovation Centre in Birmingham on Saturday June 27th. A good number of mice ran this year, some for the first time. The morning practice was a nerve-wracking affair which looked like it would result in another win by MouseX. However, a couple of mechanical repairs, some software tweaks and an unusually fortunate maze configuration saw a new champion emerge…
By Bernard Grabowski
The 2009 National Schools and Colleges Micromouse competition took place on Saturday 27th June at the Technology Innovation Centre in Birmingham. The team from John Hampden Grammar School were once again strongly represented. They have dominated the event for several years but this time were pushed to the limit by teams from three debuting schools. Competition was intense and new event best times were recorded. The existing drag race record (2.132 seconds, set last year by the team from Singapore) was smashed several times and now stands at an incredible 1.699 sec. The track is just less than 7m in length and the mouse had to stop under control within 1m beyond the finish line. Peak acceleration must now be around 1g in this event and braking has to start at just past the halfway mark.
Here is a bit of a look at how to use the ADC on the STM32 for simple applications. The ADC peripheral on the STM32 processor is a flexible but complex beast. The peripheral driver library should make it relatively easy to use. After all, there is no need to remember the names of all those pesky registers and bitfields. There are anything up to 18 multiplexed channels that can be converted singly, continually, scanned or discontinuously. The results can be transferred to memory through DMA and some devices have two or more ADCs for simultaneous conversions. With all those options, simple reading of an ADC port is a little tricky…
The Nokia LCD displays are among my favourite toys. Generally, I use a monochrome display intended for the Nokia 3410 ‘phone. This a display size of 96 x 48 pixels and can display bitmaps as well as text in 6 rows of 16 characters. It is smaller than the more common 16×2 text-only displays, easier to drive, cheaper, uses fewer connections, much more flexible and is readily available. And now, I have connected one up to my STM32F103 Cortex-M3 processor. As a first go with the SPI peripheral on these processors, it has been quite instructive…
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While I have a couple of STM32 development boards already, I was looking around for something a bit more flexible. Somehow, development kits always seem to have the wrong set of peripherals and pins I want to play with are not available. After a bit of hunting, I came across this board, made by ETT. It comes in a convenient, small size with two single rows of pins for the IO. Perfect for plugging into a breadboards for some proper playing…
It would be nice to start with a simple LED flashing, blinky type application. Well simple is a bit of an overstatement. The code to blink an LED is easy enough but those nice folk at ST have provided a special peripheral driver library. This library abstracts much of the hardware from the user and should make for more portable code. The library sources are all in standard C and are supposed to compile up just like anything. Even with the benefit if an IDE, this would be a bit tricky to set up. Without one, it means a lot of messing about with makefiles, linker scripts and startup code. This is how I set up mine on a Mac. Much the same arrangement will work just fine on a PC. Included is a project template to speed things up…
Tony Wilcox of Birmingham City University has been working with the design and implementation of Infra Red wall sensors for their student micromouse design. This type of sensor has become common in mouse designs although there are several variations on the theme. Tony’s version uses readily available parts in a robust and repeatable design with a couple of extra tweaks that make it possible to use the same sensor to measure distance over a very wide range of distances without having to change the drive current to the emitter…
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